It might be the season of giving, but it's also been a year of taking away. Scammers have been hitting Clevelanders and now there's a list of the top 5 scams in northeast Ohio for 2015.
We have interviewed people who've lost thousands this year and now the Better Business Bureau has its "Scam Tracker" list out.
The number-one reported scam is IRS related calls. We just did a story about a woman from northeast Ohio who lost $1,900. The IRS will never call you and never threaten you with prosecution or jail time.
Fake government grants is second. People have gotten contacted a ton in the past year about these kinds of scams.
Third is sweepstakes; just this fall we interviewed a woman from our area whose mother was scammed out of $45,000. The mom was promised a huge prize from Publisher's Clearing House so the elderly woman kept sending money in various ways including taping cold hard cash into a book and mailing it off.
“My mom is devastated, absolutely humiliated,” said her daughter, who wanted to remain anonymous. “(My parents) have nothing now…nothing to fall back on. That was their nest egg.”
The other two scams were tech support when someone contacts you saying your computer has a virus or a problem and debt collections that are phony.
If you have any scammers contacting you, get ahold of us, the BBB and the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.
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